Current literature sees expressions of popular racism in twentieth-century European state-socialist societies either as directly deriving from the official ideology of the state or else as happening despite it. This article argues that the ways in which Vietnamese workers were racialised in 1980s Czechoslovakia were neither directly derived from the state’s official ideology, nor did they arise in opposition to that ideology. Instead, it suggests that they are more usefully seen as reworkings of certain elements of the state’s official ideology. Most important among those elements were: the insistence that racism did not exist in Czechoslovakia; the centrality of ‘honest socialist work’; and the conception of the overseas foreign workers programme as a socialist civilising mission of sorts. In most cases, some or all of these notions worked in tandem, and, moreover, also built upon existing discourses in regard to the Roma.
I heard the joke from a cousin of mine, who was born some two years after the collapse of state socialism in Czechoslovakia.
2.
MillsC. W., The Racial Contract (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1997). See also A. Mellegh, On the East-West Slope: globalization, nationalism, racism and discourse on Eastern Europe (Budapest, Central European University Press, 2006), and J. Böröcz, ‘The fox and the raven: the European Union and Hungary renegotiate margins of “Europe”’, Comparative Studies in Society and History (Vol. 42, no. 4, 2000), pp. 847–75.
3.
See WolffL., Inventing Eastern Europe: the map of civilization on the mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1994) and TodorovaM., Imagining the Balkans (New York, Oxford University Press, 1997).
4.
Although as ValdezJonathan, in Internationalism and the Ideology of Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993), makes clear, socialist internationalism was a contentious concept as, especially after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the struggles over its definitions were also struggles over the extent of Soviet influence over the state-socialist Central and Eastern European countries.
5.
OmiM.WinantH., Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (New York, Routledge, 1994).
6.
WeitzE. D., ‘Racial politics without the concept of race: re-evaluating Soviet ethnic and national purges’, Slavic Review (Vol. 61, no. 1, 2002), pp. 1–29.
7.
Weitz, ibid., p. 3.
8.
Weitz, ibid., p. 5.
9.
HirschEspecially F., ‘Race without the practice of politics’, Slavic Review (Vol. 61, no. 1, 2002), pp. 30–43, and WeinerA., ‘Nothing but certainty’, Slavic Review (Vol. 61, no. 1, 2002), pp. 44–53.
10.
McClellanW., ‘Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern Schools, 1925–1934’, The International Journal of African Historical Studies (Vol. 26, no. 2, 1993), pp. 371–90.
11.
HesslerJ., ‘Death of an African student in Moscow’, Cahiers du Monde russe (Vol. 47, no. 1–2, 2006), pp. 33–64.
12.
Ibid., p. 38.
13.
Ibid., p. 57, italics in the original.
14.
BlakelyA., Russia and the Negro: Blacks in Russian history and thought (Washington, D.C., Howard University Press, 1986).
15.
Quist-AdadeC., ‘From paternalism to ethnocentrism: images of Africa in Gorbachev’s Russia’, Race & Class (Vol. 46, no. 4, 2005), pp. 79–89.
16.
Ibid., p. 84.
17.
MatusevichM., ‘An exotic subversive: Africa, Africans and the Soviet everyday’, Race & Class (Vol. 49, no. 4, 2008), pp. 57–81. See also MatusevichM., ‘Probing the limits of internationalism: African students confront Soviet ritual’, Anthropology of East Europe Review (Vol. 27, no. 2, 2009), pp. 19–39 and M. Matusevich, ‘Revisiting the Soviet moment in Sub-Saharan Africa’, History Compass (Vol. 7, no. 5, 2009), pp. 1259–68.
18.
ZatlinJ. R., ‘Scarcity and resentment: economic sources of xenophobia in the GDR, 1971–1989’, Central European History (Vol. 40, no. 4, 2007), pp. 683–720.
19.
Ibid., pp. 705, 706.
20.
Ibid., p. 715.
21.
Zatlin cites a figure of 50 per cent of net earnings, which corresponds to the figure for Czechoslovakia as well.
22.
These transactions were, in fact, substitutes for cash remittances, which were not possible due to the inconvertibility of Eastern European currencies.
23.
‘Usnesení vlády Československé socialistické Republiky ze dne 15. března 1967, č. 74 o zabezpečení odborného školení a praxe občanů Vietnamské demokratické republiky v ČSSR’, National Archive, Labour Ministry collection, Prague (henceforth NA, MPSV). None of the primary sources used in this article have yet been catalogued, hence I can identify them only by naming the archive or the institution in which I was given access to them – thanks to the great kindness of the archivists and other staff. Thus, the box numbers, and other customary identifiers, are missing (with the partial exception of materials from the Security Forces section of the Interior Ministry archives – Archiv bezpečnostních složek, ABS).
24.
Interview with Mr M., 15April2011, Hanoi.
25.
‘Zpráva k návrhu usnesení vlády o zabezpečení odborného školení a praxe občanů Vietnamské demokratické republiky v ČSSR’, 25February1967; NA, MPSV.
26.
‘Dohoda mezi vládou Československé socialistické republiky a vládou Vietnamské demokratické republiky o odborné přípravě občanů Vietnamské demokratické republiky v československých organizacích’, signed in Hanoi on 8 April 1974; NA, MPSV.
27.
‘Jednorázové vybavení občanů VDR prádlem, oděvem, obuví a drobnými osobními potřebami.’ Appendix 4 to ‘Návrh: Dohoda mezi vládou Československé socialistické republiky a vládou Vietnamské demokratické republiky o zabezpečení odborné přípravy občanů Vietnamské demokratické republiky v československých organizacích’; NA, MPSV.
28.
‘Zpráva o stavu zabezpečení odborné přípravy občanů Vietnamské demokratické republiky v československých organizacích a k návrhu příslušné mezivládní Dohody’, September 1973, p. 6; NA, MPSV.
29.
‘Dohoda mezi vládou Vietnamské socialistické republiky a vládou Československé socialistické republiky o dočasném zaměstnávání kvalifikovaných pracovníků Vietnamské socialistické republiky spojeném s další odbornou přípravou v československých organizacích’, signed in Prague on 27 November 1980; NA, MPSV.
30.
Due to centralisation and the state’s control over curricula, the textbooks used by all schools of a given level were identical, existing in two linguistic mutations – Czech and Slovak. Hence, examining any state-socialist textbook guarantees that we are looking at the normative interpretation that was widely disseminated.
31.
Interestingly, this classification almost exactly duplicated the racial classification of Immanuel Kant; the racism of Kant’s anthropological writings has been criticised by Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘The color of reason: the idea of “race” in Kant’s anthropology’, in EzeE., ed., Postcolonial African Philosophy: a critical reader (Oxford, Blackwell, 1997), as well as C. W. Mills, op. cit.
32.
StloukalM.., Biologie pro III. ročník gymnázií (Praha, Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, 1986), p. 53.
33.
‘Odsouzení rasismu’ [Condemnation of racism], Rudé právo (16February1982), pp. 1, 7.
34.
‘Objektový svazek Zahraniční dělníci, StB České Budějovice’, report from 19 May 1981, ABS, OB 332.
35.
A recent example is SharmanJ. C., Repression and Resistance in Communist Europe (London, RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).
36.
For the Czechoslovak case, see especially PullmannM., Konec experimentu: Přestavba a pád komunismu v Československu (Prague, Scriptorium, 2011). For the Soviet Union, see especially A. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: the last Soviet generation (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2006). For Hungary and the GDR, see, for example, E. Bartha, ‘Welfare dictorship, the working class and the change of regimes in East Germany and Hungary’, Europe-Asia Studies (Vol. 63, no. 9, 2011), pp. 1591–610, and J. Kopstein, ‘Ulbricht embattled: the quest for socialist modernity in the light of new sources’, Europe-Asia Studies (Vol. 46, no. 4, 1994), pp. 597–615.
37.
DonertC., ‘“The struggle for the soul of the Gypsy”: marginality and mass mobilization in Stalinist Czechoslovakia’, Social History (Vol. 33, no. 2, 2008), pp. 123–44.
38.
SokolovaV., A Matter of Speaking: racism, gender and social deviance in the politics of the ‘Gypsy question’ in Communist Czechoslovakia, 1945–1989 (dissertation, University of Washington, 2002), p. 14.
39.
Ibid., p. 90.
40.
Ibid., p. 239.
41.
DesdemondM.EmirbayerM., ‘What is racial domination?’, Du Bois Review (Vol. 6, no. 2, 2009), pp. 335–55.
42.
BenedictR., Race and Racism, cited in A. Brah, ‘Ambivalent documents/fugitive pieces: author, text, subject, and racializations’, in MurjiK.SolomosJ., eds, Racialization: studies in theory and practice (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005).
43.
C. Donert, op. cit., p. 130.
44.
Case from 13 June 1985; ABS, č.př. 2849–2860/96, balík č. 68.
45.
See historian Carlo Ginzburg’s use of transcripts of sixteenth-century inquisitorial witch trials for study of popular piety in GinzburgC., ‘Witchcraft and popular piety: notes on a Modenese trial of 1519’, in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore, MD, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
46.
‘Úřední záznam k reagenci občanů na situaci mezi vietnamskými státními příslušníky, kteří pracují jako dělníci u n.p. Sempra Tušimice’, 27 March 1983; ABS, 2126–2139/91, bal. č. 78.
47.
‘Úřední záznam k ohlasu na zásah pořádkové jednotky VB v Tušimicích – ubytovny SEMPRA Tušimice’, 24 March 1983; ABS, 2126–2139/91, bal. č. 78.
48.
‘Úřední záznam k ohlasu na reakci lidí v souvislosti s občany Vietnamské socialistické republiky’, 24 March 1983; ABS, 2126–2139/91, bal. č. 78.
49.
J. R. Zatlin, op. cit.
50.
Interview with Ms K, České Budějovice, 22February2011.
51.
The Labour Ministry forwarded a copy of the letter to the Industry Ministry with the request that it check the situation in the employment and housing of foreign workers employed by the relevant company (Veba Broumov). No further information on how the case was further handled is available in the archives.
52.
Uncatologued, unarchived, held by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Prague.
53.
I. Vasiljev, ‘Vietnamští pracující ve vědomí naší společnosti’, Etnické procesy IV: ethnické procesy v pohraničí českých zemí po r. 1945, sborník referátů přednesených na konferenci s mezinárodní účastí konané ve dnech 5.-8. listopadu 1984 v Sobotíně, okr. Šumperk, část 3 (Praha, Československá akademie věd, Ústav pro etnografii a folkloristiku, 1984).
54.
See for example a series of articles ‘Čtyři tisíce kilometrů po jižním Vietnamu’ [4,000 kilometers through southern Vietnam], published by Rudé právo in installments on 30 January, 5 February, 10 February and 16 February 1982.
55.
‘Bystré oči, šikovné ruce’ [Sharp eyes, skillful hands], Rudé právo (13September1985), p. 3.
56.
See AlamgirA., ‘Bureaucratic disgruntling and intimate interventions: Vietnamese trainees and temporary workers in (the care of) state-socialist Czechoslovakia’, paper presented at Comparing Past and Present conference, UC Berkeley, 12 August 2009.
57.
Interview with Ms K, op. cit.
58.
Interview with Mr B, Chomutov, 27 January 2011.
59.
The names for a number of school subjects contain the word výchova in Czech, although, as a rule, they are subjects that combine skill-based and knowledge- or ethics-based learning: physical education, art education, civics, religious education, and so forth.
60.
Interview with Ms B, 20 April 2010, Prague.
61.
Interview with Mr B, op. cit.
62.
‘Informace o operativní situaci ve VčK pro vedoucího tajemníka KV KSČ’, 15 July 1981; ABS, přír. HK z roku 1988, obal 11.
63.
MaldonadoM., ‘Racial triangulation of Latino/a workers by agricultural employers’, Human Organization (Vol. 65, no. 4, 2006), pp. 353–61.
64.
During biology classes in the 1980s teachers would sometimes show students large colour photographs, perhaps a square foot in size, of people purportedly representing, in an ideal-typical way, the three racial types (author’s personal recollection). Such practice trained students to see both the Vietnamese and the Cuban as racially different, but, say, the Poles as not.
65.
‘Incident v Milevsku – vzájemné napadení občana L. Medka vietnamskými občany a občana Jakubíka v Hořovicích’, dated 20 July 1982; NA, MPSV.
66.
See, for instance, SakamotoA.GoyetteK.KimC., ‘Socioeconomic attainments of Asian Americans’, Annual Review of Sociology (Vol. 35, 2009), pp. 255–76.
67.
Interview with Mr C, 1 February 2011, Milevsko.
68.
V. Kahlerová, Vietnamská menšina v Plzni (M.A. thesis, Plzeň, Katedra sociální a kulturní antropologie, Fakulta humanitních studií, Západočeská univerzita v Plzni, 2000), p. 67.
